# Open Source 👩🏻‍💻

## View from our telescope 🔭

Open source projects have long been considered the core example many point to when talking about the future of community-driven business models. From smaller, independently maintained repositories to large organizations empowering users to build alongside them, open source these projects rely on their communities to not only survive but also to truly thrive.

Your typical open source community tends to have a few things in common: an understanding of Git, a shared repository, and some sort of README documentation, to just name a few.

Many members contributing to open source projects tend to have some sort of development background, but not all open source communities require a more fleshed-out knowledge of development skillsets. Most importantly, these communities require a shared mindset for collaboration, cooperation, and co-creation.

### The 'standard' open source community

The ‘standard’ open source community has a pretty comparative core tech stack, usually, a code repository, commonly hosted on GitHub, some form of synchronous communication for core members, and sometimes a Twitter account or mailing list as well. These communities usually all have some basic understanding or intrinsic knowledge of the development process and typically can code in some form.

Some open source communities are so well known and commonplace that you may not recognize them at a first glance as an open source community. Projects like Mozilla, Linux, freeCodeCamp, VS Code, and well, Orbit all have significant open source elements to them.

(P.S. If you’re looking to get more involved or learn more about open source, check out [first timers only](https://www.firsttimersonly.com/) or [the open source guide](https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/)!)

## Challenges they face

While tight roots in collaboration and co-creation draw many to open source, it brings along with it some unique challenges.
First and foremost, moderation, having a code of conduct, and creating an inclusive, welcoming environment need to be taken seriously in order for the project to truly create a high-gravity community.

User support of the project is another overlooked point. When the project hasn’t been adopted by many, it may not seem too much of a burden at first. But as the project grows, the number of dependencies may scale as well.

If this is a repo maintained by a company or larger organization, you may be at an advantage, with funding to pay folks to maintain the project — but unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Getting volunteer contributors and maintainers to reliably communicate or update the needs of users can be difficult.

Naturally, if you’ve got a good set of folks who are maintaining or contributing to the project you’ll want to make sure you’re cultivating their needs in order to create a healthy project and additionally a healthy community.

If these challenges aren’t taken seriously — the project could lose trust or traction among not only those who maintain it, but also those who rely on it or support it with attention, time, energy or even financial means as well.

Furthermore, a lack of a healthy community could lead the project to suffer other alignment problems. If not aligned on the direction to move in, the project could stall and suffer growth.

Most importantly, a high-gravity healthy community requires a diverse community of individuals complete with diverse skillsets, knowledge, and ideas. By paying attention and dedicating time, energy, and resources to building a healthy community and the maintenance of it, you effectively contribute to a better internet for us all.

## The Orbit Model in Action

The historical context of open source developers frequently refers to them as hobbyists. As the movement grew over time, so too did the number of companies that built and maintained open-source projects. Whether or not a project is run by a group of hobbyists or a group of professionals — they both rely on community structures in order to maintain. In this next wave of open source, we can rely on the Orbit Model in order to guide, inform, and grow these communities.

### Gravity

Gravity is defined as the rate at which member involvement is changing.
Open source communities can rely on understanding the gravity of the community to see if the project is gaining traction to predict the needs that they might have. Has there recently been an increase in new members, support requests, or projects relying on the original repo?

**By spending time understanding how new contributors or maintainers are pulled into the community, you can determine the motivations of others.**

- How are new contributors pulled into the community?
- What inspires action for the members?

They pull themselves toward the community voluntarily, drawn in by an alignment to the mission, a sense of value for themselves, and relationships with other members.

### Love

The open source space currently has a series of accepted defined roles that describe how one interacts with the code repository. We can rely on the Orbit Model to understand how these individuals work together and one's level of commitment to a project.

**Currently, most repos are broken into:**

- **Maintainers**: those who are responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the repository — managing the decisions that need to be made about the repository.
- **Contributors**: those who make contributions to a project's repo. These can be small adjustments (correcting typos), or large chunks of code or features. At the end of the day, they may not make or break a project — but without them, innovation will not continue to exist.
- **Users**: those who use the underlying code in their own project possibly relying on it to build on top of it an entirely new project.

Using the Orbit Model, we can keep track of these different roles and how each individual is fitting within these roles. Understanding who is maintaining, contributing, or even using your code will allow you to get better insights and feedback to help understand and reward those who are using your project.

If you're working with a highly-forked project that has many other projects relying on it, maintainers can rely on the data provided by Orbit to gain a better understanding of who to reach out to when deciding what upcoming features to build or implement. If you're a developer advocate or community builder for an open-source project, you can take a peek at who your top contributors or commenters are.

Knowing this can help you celebrate those who are helping create value with you. Whether someone is new to the community or has been around for years, knowing why, how, how often, and how much they participate can guide better insights to the community as a whole.

### Reach

While open-source software has been around for a while, it's had a recent explosion of interest as of late. Much of this is because of the ability to co-create and collaborate in ways that we never before thought were possible, along with the fact that open-source software has increased in its credibility as a whole.

Sure, many projects may still be small repositories, open to the public — but how many people are actually participating and engaged in the project? Using the Orbit Model to understand the reach of your project and those involved can not only increase awareness and credibility but also influence and attract those who are interested in the project as a whole.

The Orbit Model breaks down reach into both direct and indirect interactions. If folks discover your project through a lot of large, widespread events, your project relies on a lot of indirect interactions. However, if folks are discovering your project through one-on-one shared conversations, this might
Understanding the type of interactions folks are having can help you identify those who are in the ecosystem and those who are building the ecosystem. Diving into this concept of interactions will also allow us to explore the concept of betweenness, or in the open-source community, determine the relationship between those who are contributing to the project and those who are reliant on the projects.

Additionally, understanding the reach of your members can help you learn more about how to best get the word or information out about your projects. In the world of open source, we've started to establish a culture of “celebrities” in the space. Those who build, maintain and continue to grow communities and projects in the open-source world. These folks likely have a large GitHub following and tend to be active on Twitter or Twitch, typically teaching others what they know.

At Orbit, Bryan Robinson and Eric Berry are heavily involved in the open-source world and spend a lot of time teaching others what they know either through documentation, streaming, or other related projects. Knowing this, and the relationships they have with the projects they are involved in, we can better gain an understanding of their interests and excitements.

### Impact

The best part, in our humble Orbit opinion, is the impact you can have when you truly lean into and embrace the open-source mindset and lean into the community. Open source projects, because of their collaborative nature, can inspire others to share knowledge, learn new skills and build relationships with some quite magnificent individuals.

As documented in the impact portion of this site — we can start to identify different flywheels that may develop because of these open-source groups. These projects and businesses (like Orbit) use community-led growth tactics in order to ensure that they are building with their members in mind.

One common phenomenon we see in the open-source world is a knowledge-sharing flywheel. Open-source projects allow passionate people to contribute their ideas toward what they love, receive proper acknowledgment for these ideas, and share these passions with others. We often see this cultivated through communities through the champions program.

## A High-Gravity Community

At the end of the day — it's less about the actual theory, practice, or project you're working on and more about creating a high-gravity community. Reward those who participate, educate, support, and encourage others within the open-source world and you'll find that the connections and relationships built long supersede the actual project itself.
